Government eager (but struggling) to make data available to businesses

In a keynote address at a conference marking Data Innovation Day, Nick Sinai, deputy U.S. CTO, talked up the Obama administration’s efforts to bring more government information online, freely available to the public in a machine-readable format.

But that work has been slow going, with agencies reporting varying levels of progress in response to a White House directive to open up their data sets.

“Too much of it is trapped in government systems, and even when it’s technically available online it’s often hard to find, understand and reuse. And a lot of it isn’t even online,” Sinai said.

For instance, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Weather Service, has estimated that just 10% of its data is available on the Web, according to Sinai. Such low availability rates for non-sensitive data that holds significant commercial potential are unacceptable to the administration.